This is a guide to some of the sources I've found interesting or useful. The list isn't exhaustive or definitive, and reflects my personal biases. If you have other favorites that might fit in this collection, please drop me a note.

Style Guidance
Criticism
Human-Computer Interaction
Writing
Other References

Style Guidance

Gareth's style guide
Gareth Rees is a PhD student at Cambridge University. He also has an exposition and history of tree-structured fiction and a nice bibliography of SciFi criticism.

Style Guide for online hypertext
The original, but still very useful, reference from Tim Berners-Lee.

WWW Style Manual
The Yale Medical School's web style guide. Nicely illustrated, with only a small tendency to get long-winded. The organization breaks things down into small doses that can make navigation mildly annoying. It's geared towards "academic" documents more than business or presentation styles.

Top 10 Ways to Make Your WWW Service a Flop
What not to do. A comprehensive map of the path to failure, compiled by Dr. T. Matthew Ciolek at the Australian National University.

An HTML 2.0 Pattern Language
This is a formative attempt at a pattern language for web documents, authored by Robert Orenstein. It's an interesting start, and raises some issues about whether this field is actually rich enough to have real patterns. Pattern language is a discipline that came out of the work of architect Christopher Alexander. It uses generalizations ("patterns") about achitectural practice to simplify the architectural process and provide possible solution elements for complex architectural problems.

HTML for Fun and Profit (SunSoft Press)
This is a practical introduction to setting up a web site and creating your first web pages. Mary Morris has created a comprehensive guide to getting started on the web. Look for Web Page Design: A Different Multimedia, by Mary Morris and Randy Hinrichs, coming in early 1996.

Criticism

Why the Web sucks
A self-professed "rant" by CJ Silverio. Among the conclusions are that content is what makes a web document useful, and that good content takes work to create.

Why is the Web So Boring?
An essay by Stovin Hayter, postulating that the quality of the interactive experience is what makes a web page compelling.

HyperContent, HyperJunk
By Jorn Barger. Lots of examples to illustrate his points. Includes pointers to successful ASCII image maps, a concept that I find fascinating.

Why I Like the Web
A thoughtful discussion of why the web is good for a visual artist, by Kristen Ankiewicz. She also presents guidance on how to do image intensive presentations responsibly, and gives a plausible counter to my suggestion that the 256-color audience is the most important target.

If You Can Read This, You Ain't Using Netscape
Some thoughts on browser-specific implementation by Marcus Freericks. It might be hard to see what he's so upset about.

Human-Computer Interaction

Tog on interface (Addison-Wesley)
This anecdotal collection of essays by Bruce Tognazzini on user interface design can give even a hardened "we don't need no stinking user interface design" engineer a moment or two of thought on usability and user-centered design.

Usability Inspection Methods (Wiley)
Edited by Jakob Nielsen and Robert Mack, this is a practical catalog of techniques for ensuring that people can actually use your web pages the way you want them to. It's slanted towards more traditional user interface development tasks, but almost all of the methods described have a place in evaluating web pages.

Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques (SunSoft Press)
Written by Darrell Sano and Kevin Mullet, this is a thoroughly illustrated text on communicating via visual interfaces. The authors fill a long-vacant gap in the user interface design literature, solidly establishing a case for visual design as a critical discipline for user interface developers.

Writing

Politics and the English Language
George Orwell on writing, ca 1946. Pertinent if you believe, as I do, that the quality of writing on a web page directly effects the perceived quality of the page. Living up to his six basic rules is a challenge:
• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

What is good hypertext writing?
Jutta Degener has created a thoughtful, succinct introduction to writing and publishing hypertext documents. The current technical nature of the process of creating web pages seduces us into concentrating on form at the expense of content.

HTML is no TML
More from Jutta Degener, pointing out the typographical failings of HTML. Ripe grounds for the "don't worry about typography, trust the HTML rocket scientists and fix the browser" crowd.

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed (Pantheon)
Intimate Apparel: A dictionary of the Senses (Times Books)
The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed (Ticknor & Fields)
These wonderful books on language by Karen Elizabeth Gordon may cause Strunk and White to twirl a bit, but they're rich, entertaining and highly readable.

The Elements of Style
The original, by William Strunk, Jr. On-line version courtesy of Project Bartleby at Columbia.

Other References

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and
Envisioning Information (Graphics Press)
Edward Tufte's landmark works on the graphic presentation of information. Tufte is a convincing proponent of creating information-rich visuals, and he backs up his theories with beautiful examples.

Quality, Guidelines & Standards for Internet Inf. Resources
Also from ANU, this is a compendium of quality-related material for information resources. It's fairly comprehensive, and is kept up-to-date.

As We May Think
This essay by Vannevar Bush was published in the July 1945 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Section 6 and onward detail his "memex," an information storage and retrieval device, and the basics of hypertext.

hypertext and literary things
A large, well-maintained collection of links on hypertext by Kia Mennie. Subjects range from academic essays to fiction to technical references. (The pages are being moved to the above location, and may be in temporary disrepair.)

Writing HTML - a tutorial for creating WWW pages
This is a solid, fairly comprehensive on-line tutorial for learning the basics of HTML. Created by Alan Levine at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, Maricopa County Community College District, Arizona.

Poynton's Color Technology Page
Charles Poyton maintains a detailed FAQ list on color and color perception in computer graphics. This is an excellent, detailed resource to help understand the subtleties of computer displays and gamma correction. Also worth examination are his comments on typography and design, and his book A Technical Introduction to Digital Video (Wiley).